1913-09-Improvement Era-An Invitation to Rev Davidson

Improvement Era, v16 n11, September 1913, pp. 1166-1168

An invitation to Rev. Davidson to join the Latter-day Saints was recently given by President Ben E. Rich of the Eastern States Mission. Rev. Davidson had become dissatisfied with his church, for reasons, perhaps similar to those that influenced the minister in The Calling of Dan Matthews, had burned his vestments and renounced his allegiance. Hence President Rich's invitation which appeared simultaneously in the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, and other eastern papers, Monday, August 11. We quote from the Sun:

"New York. Aug. 11.—If the Rev. Charles Steele Davidson, of Charlottesville, Va., who renounced his allegiance to the Protestant Episcopal Church by burning his vestments and prayer book at the gates of Monticello, will apply at a mission house at 33 West One Hundred and Twenty-sixth street he will find a man waiting to welcome him into a new faith.

"This man, who thinks he has the brand of religion the Rev. Mr. Davidson will like, is Ben E. Rich, president of the Eastern States Mission of the 'Mormon' Church.

"President Rich made the case of the Rev. Mr. Davidson the subject of his sermon in the Harlem branch of the 'Mormon' Church yesterday.

" 'It is very significant to me,' Mr. Rich said, 'that the Rev. Mr. Davidson burned his vestments after finding that the church to which he belonged was "spiritually dead." We have been accused of being about everything that is vile, but we have never been accused of being spiritually dead.

" 'They have often found that our organization was the "strongest organization in the world outside of the German Army." Critics of our Church agree on this characterization. In fact, we might tell Mr. Davidson the secret of our Church's power. It is only that we are not spiritually dead. All that holds our organization together, in fact, is the spiritual enthusiasm of its membership.

" 'That is all there is to it. A Civil War general turned lecturer after the war, and he specialized on anti-"Mormon" and temperance lecturers. He preached against us a dozen years and then came upon some workmen of our faith who were erecting a monument to the first "Mormon" prophet, Joseph Smith, at his birthplace, in Sharon, Windsor county, Vt.

" 'The old soldier and anti-"Mormon" lecturer looked at the workmen, talked to them, learned of the lively glowing faith that kept them to their task, as it carried our pioneer caravans across the Great American Desert. And finally he wrote a letter to a prominent officer of the Church declaring that while he hated and detested our religion, still he was forced to concede that it was a remarkable thing, in an age of general faithlessness in God, to find any creed so completely fanatical in its faith as ours was. We do believe in God with all our hearts, and we don't go half way with our belief.

" 'If the Rev. Mr. Davidson should come with us he would find no special appointment awaiting him in a segregated clergy. And he would not find our poor held off in the back pews. He might find, should he join a "Mormon" ward, that his grocer was his bishop, while his woman servant was a prominent official of the Woman's Relief Society. And he might find that the boy who delivered his groceries at his back door was an elder, and the farmer who brought in his green groceries was a high priest.

"In Sunday meetings he might be asked to speak just after the grocer boy had spoken in his capacity as an elder or the farmer had officiated at the sacrament in his capacity as a high priest.

" 'Should he take to our mission field, he would find a millionaire's son giving out tracts alongside the son of a poor grocer or butcher, and he would find the two preaching together in street meetings. He would find that all our missionaries, instead of being in service with the idea of making a career out of it, were yielding that time to the cause they have espoused. He would find that, while formerly working in some store or field or industrial occupation, they individually saved the money on which they entered the mission field and that each one expects to go back to the trade or employment he abandoned at the termination of his three years of service in the cause of his religion.

" 'So that ours is a religion to which everyone gives and in which all take that abiding joy that comes with service freely rendered. At our meetings here folks of every social estate mingle freely and alternate one with another in doing the preaching. We have no paid clergy.

" 'We have no clerical class removed from the rest of us. That is why we were good Americans when we permitted an apostle to become a candidate for the United States Senate. Scored as we have been for this, we found a justification for it that other churches could not comprehend, since our Church organiaztion was so different.

" 'Had Senator Smoot been a chief official of any other church, he would have been set apart from the general community. He would have been graduated from a church school, ordained to the clergy, and a living would have been provided for him. He would have attained a great height in a calling to which he had dedicated his time and energies.

" 'Any lay member of our Church might have been summoned for the Church work Senator Smoot was called upon to do as an apostle. Every apostle in the Church has been so called, in fact. President Woodruff tended his farm and pitched his hay with his own hands after he became President, as he had done before. Apostle Woodruff, his son, could ride mountain ponies in a roundup with any cowboy on his ranch, and Brigham Young, Jr., an apostle, was as good a frontiersman almost as his father.

" 'So we can assure the Rev. Mr. Davidson a welcome among us into a spiritually alive organization in which there are no lines as to rich and poor or powerful and weak, and in which our charities are so attended to that no one knows about them and there is no parading of the beneficiaries before their luckier brothers and sisters. He may abhor the thought of coming with us right now, but it is because he has no doubt heard from our enemies about us. In proclaiming that the churches of his day are spiritually dead he proclaims what our first prophet taught us as the exact reason why he had been divinely appointed to restore in this age the exact Gospel as Christ taught it and established it on earth.' "